“How have you been?” she asked
“Life’s been better… yourself?” he replied.
“Same predicament, life’s been better but, it’s not horrible.”
“Yeah, life’s just, going, more or less.”
“I know what you mean,” she said, “It’s like every second has its own pulse and its own time span, so you lose track of how much time is actually passing.”
“Precisely… I feel as if my life is wasting away!”
“Hmmm, I can relate, though I am young, I feel as if I have lived longer and accomplished nothing… therefore am worth nothing and have given nothing to the world.”
“My feelings exactly…” he sighed. “I feel I am just getting by… and what sort of bland experience is that?”
“it’s a tasteless experience that no one should go through yet, here we are… watching our lives pass by as through someone else’s eyes.”
“It’s the dance of lies…some of us are to good at it.”
“I quite agree…” she concurred. “And it is a dance that I wish I would not have to participate in, but alas, all must take a hand in this event… no matter how consequential.”
“It is a sordid affair, alas, but it is all we have ever known… excepting those few instances we find freedom from the everlasting cycle of sameness.”
“If only freedom was truly free to all,” she cried, “that in itself is a lie. So how can one live freely in a totalitarian society that is being masked with a concept of democracy… one cannot, and the idea of freedom plagues my mind until I about go mad with desire.”
“Aye… our ‘freedom’ is but a finely wrought cage… and we are all slaves to our baser fears.”
“True, but what is fear in the name of ‘freedom’? To think that one can escape oneself is feverishly yearned for, but the prison bars of guilt and remorse provide an amply built barrier.”
“Indeed,” he said, “For when we find an escape from ourselves, we just manage to lose ourselves deeper into the emptiness of our fragile existence…”
“Therefore, we are not breaking the chains of slavery that have us hostage, but tightening the hold that they have on our life’s core. We can never truly be free.” She concluded.
“Freedom is but a myth,” he explained, “propagated by both friend and foe alike to forever contain us within a struggle for it.”
“So, we are made to fight and yearn for something that will never be ours as a way to be kept under control by those who truly run our lives…”
“It is the way we are expected to act… and that is why sometimes it is better to act outside the boundaries of what is expected.”
“Hmm, I see…” she said, “ so it would be considered better to break the rules then to bend them in order to maybe salvage some form of a mistaken reality, but in actuality, it would be better to come to grasp with the truth of the situation.”
“What is truth, but what we make of it?” he asked.
“But isn’t honesty a virtue?” she countered. “So shouldn’t we abide by the simplicity of the ones who have walked our paths before or are we merely instruments of a higher power?”
“Perhaps...” he answers, “Perhaps it is our desires that define us and our judgment our crutch. When we can decide our own fates, and not just rely on blind faith, we can attest to the highest we are able to.”
“Which, by definition, would mean that we would become who we are truly meant to be… by unorthodox means or not.”
“Indubitably. What, then, is our desire to choose?” he asked.
“I believe that it would be the means by which we decide how our future will unfurl, but whether or not we have that desire inside us would be the real question of consequence.”
“For, truly, the future is what we make of it. Our choices define us as we make them. All this in an attempt to live.”
“All this in an attempt to live a life worth living…” she argued, “ though, how can one measure worth when it is a not a materialistic subject?”
“We measure it by the thing we remember. Memory is the true judge of life.”
“Yes, but memory can be controlled by outside forces, so how do you know when the judgment is being fixed or swayed?”
“You cannot, … so you make your memory what you need it to be.”
“So, in the end, we will live our life as though we know what has happened to us because we claim to remember, but we may never know if what we believe is the past, really is.” She affirmed.
“Unless what we decide happened is the truth. Only when you’ve lost everything can you truly do anything… even control.”
“Which means to be mad is to be truly sane.” She concluded.
“ ‘We’re all mad here.’ “ he said smiling.